Voice mail systems generally provide voice "mailboxes" which are assigned to users. Callers can deposit (i.e. leave) recorded messages in a particular user's mailbox. A user can interrogate an assigned mailbox, obtain a count of the number of messages left by callers and retrieve any messages which have been left by callers.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,371,752 (Matthews) describes an early computerized voice mail system. In recent years computerized voice mail systems have come into wide spread use. Voice mail systems are commercially available from a wide variety of companies including Octel Communications Corporation. VMX Inc., International Business Machines Corp., etc.
Present day voice mail systems have the ability to send a voice message to a list of users. Thus, such systems can be used to quickly distribute news items to a designated list of users. However, it has been found that using a normal voice mail system to distribute news items has a variety of drawbacks. Some mailbox users do not regularly interrogate their mailboxes and thus the mailboxes tend to become cluttered with news messages. Furthermore messages left in a mailbox are normally retrieved in the order in which they were deposited, hence, a user may listen to one message only to find as he continues to listen to later messages that the first message has been superseded by a later message. The present invention provides an improved system for distribution of news messages by means of a voice mail system. With the present invention messages are not placed in a user's mail box at the time they are received by the system. Each time a user interrogates an assigned mailbox, the system checks to see if any current news items were received since this mailbox was last interrogated. If there are such news items they are transferred to the mailbox that is being interrogated.